Don't worry, I have a good explanation for this nastiness.
I have a wicked sweet tooth and I try to fight it pretty hard so I'm not 600 pounds at 5'2". But a girl's got to have some treats and I do like making treats. So about once a week, the boys and I settle in after naptime to make cookies, muffins, or some other kind of goodie. Yesterday I decided we would make fudge. I've never made real fudge and the recipe in my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook looked easy enough. I had my sweet husband pick up a couple missing ingredients on his way home from work and we set to work.
Things were going well until I was ready to transfer the fudge to our very neatly prepared 8"x8" pan. The recipe said to spread the fudge from the saucepan to the baking dish, you know like warm slow-moving lava that you push around in there. Only problem was that my fudge was nowhere near spreadable. It was like fast moving lava that just flowed right from the pan to the dish. This didn't seem right. I reread the recipe again and again. I hadn't forgotten anything...strange but moving on.
Red flag #2: the butter that I had smeared on the foil lining the baking dish (very carefully following the recipe's instructions) started melting and creating nasty little pools of lipids along the edges of the dish. This was not good.
My 3 1/2 year old of course wanted to see our magnificent fudge and was a bit underwhelmed. I told him we had to let it chill for a few hours and then we could eat it. Of course, how this disgusting mess would become yummy fudge was totally beyond me.
If anything, it actually became more disgusting after chilling and I am not afraid to show you. There's no soft-peddling that. Just gross. If I say I screwed something up, you can bet I really did. No jaunty self-deprecation here.
As I'm giggling that night telling my husband about our botched kitchen adventure and how very hard I tried, he gets a blank look and asks, "Did you use the whole can of evaporated milk?" Thinking what a silly questions this is, I tell him that of course I did, the recipe called for a whole can. He went on to explain that my recipe called for a 5 ounce can while the grocery store only had 12 ounce cans. Well that would do it.
We're going to try again today after the boys wake up. I have all the correct ingredients and will triple-check not only what goes in but how much. Let's hope that I'm not beat by the same recipe twice.
sidenote: My husband, brave and foolhardy man that he is, told me he tried the alleged fudge and it was the most delicious pudding he's ever had. I'm not that brave. Pin It
You could probably use it as frosting...or not. ;)
ReplyDeleteYou're very brave to share your mishap with your public, Kari...maybe cross post it over at http://craftfail.com/?
I tried my hand at fudge this Christmas, using the recipe on the Marhsmallow Cream label. My mom kept telling me "It's SO easy it's fool proof!" Well, I tried it and it tasted fine, but the texture was not smooth like I liked. So I was telling my mom about it and she had me read the recipe to her. Apparently they had changed the recipe. Nothing too major, but now, they said you had to bring it to soft ball stage, as opposed to bringing "to a boil for 5 minutes" like hers did. I googled the old recipe and it was PERFECT! If you try it again and it doesn't work out, google the old Kraft recipe. ;)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theficklehobbyist.com